128

ART. V.-Miss Berry's Journals and Correspondence. Edited by LADY THERESA LEWIS. Longman.

We can hardly assume in the majority of our readers any very definite associations with Miss Berry's name. In certain sets no name was once more familiar, or would suggest itself earlier as an example of a distinguished woman, and with many it still lives as a very definite remembrance; but social fame has limits which narrow with wonderful rapidity; and influential as was Miss Berry's circle of friends, and important as were the events in which she was more or less concerned as a trusted confidant or privileged spectator-she never attained what can be called publicity, that general recognition which popular authorship or chance circumstances give to others, holding them somewhat longer in the world's memory. For ourselves, on For ourselves, on taking up the first of these three handsome, bulky volumes, and knowing Miss Berry only as a woman of fashion, of high social reputation, who lived to a great age, retaining much of the prestige of younger days, we could not but wonder how the other two were to be filled; or how the circumstance of her having been admired by Horace Walpole, when she was little past her girlhood, and he a septuagenarian, on which fact hangs her title to fame with many of her critics, should justify such an enormous expenditure of paper and printing. The fact is that reviewers have a way of judging by first volumes. It is also certain that those passages in the favoured first volume, that can be read without the aid of the paper cutter, have the luck of being universally selected for quotations—hence the prominence that has been given to Walpole's name in every notice of the work; while really for the general reader who values biography as throwing light on the history and character of the times in which a life is spent, it advances in interest as it proceeds, and the third volume, for its topics and its appeal to general sympathies, is likely to find many more readers than the first; that is, if it is allowed a fair chance, which the last volumes of large undertakings seldom are.

Unless everything that certain persons write and say is important, there are a vast many of Horace Walpole's letters in this collection which are not important enough to be preserved. Some: indeed, are utterly frivolous, not seldom painfully so from the evidences they bear of a mind unstrung and disorganised previous to its final decay. There is a stage in the life of the intellect, when its vivacity continues unimpaired, but in which the balance fails; and there follows an effusion, an expansion, a softening in

one direction, under the breaking down of the old habitual selfrestraint; all resulting in a certain exposure, as the reader feels it. A few letters would have answered the purpose of the dozens devoted to prove that 'poor Horace Walpole at seventy-four was entirely fascinated by the attractions of the handsome, intelligent woman of twenty-five, to whom he was introduced at the critical moment when his mind, and perhaps heart, needed some new sensation; and when his old cynicism, of which there was certainly a strong infusion in his nature, was losing its power to amuse and satisfy. Even if the infinite repetition of protestations and flatteries, of anxieties, qualms, and misgivings as to the light in which his homage might appear to a young beauty and to the world, which he feared so much, does tend to raise our respect for her attractions, and to assure us of what we are willing to believe, that she might have been Lady Orford, if she would, the end is gained at an expense of space wholly unsuited to the subject. If books were still bought, as of old, by individuals, not by library companies (limited), this could not be; some stringent system of selection must be resorted to, where the purse of the consumer and the space on his book shelves must alike be consulted. But in the business of choice, the work of weighing comparative values is now deputed to the reader; he has a bundle of papers put before him in a legible form, and perhaps after all, and taking the new lavish method as a natural result of changed circumstances, the task of judging for oneself is not unamusing or uninstructive.

We have begun with Horace Walpole's share in the work before us, because he is really the hero of the first volume, and also as having laid the foundation for Miss Berry's remarkable success in society. All that has been published before either of his letters or himself, concerns the youth and prime of his powers; here we have the picture of his old age, and we are admitted into some secrets about himself, which earlier in life he would not willingly have betrayed. His exceeding anxiety for news, his passion for gossip, the machinery by which he indulged these tastes, are more upon the surface, and are more an end, and not means to some more dignified end, than they would once have claimed to be. In some respects his character strikes the reader in a new light; he is more amiable than we are used to see him. In fact the prostration of his whole interest, influence, and faculties to the service of these new-found friends,-his 'two wives,' as he calls the sisters, in order to disguise his hopeless devotion to the elder,is a new feature, and strikes us as not a little pathetic. Nor is it any light testimony to the lady that she should have been able to maintain this supremacy without any sacrifice of dignity, propriety, or independence, securing the best and most creditable

advantages from this peculiar and somewhat embarrasing friendship, and steering successfully through all the difficulties which would have beset most women in her position. He first became acquainted with these ladies in 1788, and thus describes them to Lady Ossory:-

*

'If I have picked up no recent anecdotes on our common (writes he), I have made a much more, to me, precious acquisition. It is the acquaintance of two young ladies of the name of Berry, whom I first saw last winter, and who accidentally took a house here with their father for the season, &c. &c. Their story is singular enough to entertain you. * * Mr. Berry has since carried his daughters for two or three years to France and Italy, and they are returned the best-informed and the most perfect creatures I ever saw at their age. They are exceedingly sensible, entirely natural and unaffected, frank, and, being qualified to talk on any subject, nothing is so easy and agreeable as their conversation, nor more apposite than their answers and observations. The eldest, I discovered by chance, understands Latin, and is a perfect Frenchwoman in her language. The younger draws charmingly, and has copied admirably Lady D.'s Gipsies, which I lent, though for the first time of her attempting colours. They are of pleasing figures. Mary, the eldest, sweet, with fine dark eyes, that are very lively when she speaks, with a symmetry of face that is the more interesting from being pale; Agnes, the younger, has an agreeable sensible countenance, hardly to be called handsome, but almost. She is less animated than Mary, but seems, out of deference to her sister, to speak seldomer, for they dote on each other, and Mary is always praising her sister's talents. I must even tell you they dress within the bounds of fashion, though fashionably; but without the excrescences and balconies with which modern hoydens overwhelm and barricade their persons-in short, good sense, information, simplicity, and ease characterise the Berrys. And this is not particularly mine, who am apt to be prejudiced, but the universal voice of all who know them. The first night I met them I would not be acquainted with them, having heard so much in their praise that I concluded they would be all pretension. The second time, in a very small company, I sat next to Mary, and found her an angel both inside and out. Now, I do not know which I like best; except Mary's face, which is formed for a sentimental novel, but it is ten times fitter for a fifty times better thing genteel comedy. This delightful family comes to me almost every Sunday evening, as our region is too proclamatory to play at cards on the seventh day.'-Vol. i. pp. 151, 152.

From this first meeting in 1788 to 1797, when he died, the acquaintance, thus commenced, formed his principal happinessthe avowed consolation and joy of his life. For these sisters he planned and thought and collected news in their absence; and when within reach, he was never content out of their society. As a specimen out of so large a field, take one of his letters to Miss Berry abroad, and when he was hoping for her return. The whole strain is so opposed to the commonly received idea of the man, that nothing but that tender sentiment which a fear of ridicule leads him to disclaim, can account for it

'How cruel to know you ill at such a distance! how shocking to must have patience, when one has none! I do hope I shall have another line this week, and yet the wind is westwardly! Your fever, I am persuaded,

was no slight one. Your fêtes and balls and the heat have occasioned your illness; you both left England in search of health, and yet have done as much as you could have performed in London, where at least the cold can tolerate crowds and fatigue. Nor have you been temperate even since your fever; you have aired too long, and why see four or five persons so soon, and sit up with them till eleven? All this kind Agnes has owned, tho' she says she is perfectly easy about you-can I be so, who may be a week without knowing whether you have had no return? I longed to see Agnes's writing, and she never could have sent it more apropos, since there was occasion for it-you yourself were both kind and unkind to write so much—but burn the French! why write so much about them? For heaven's sake be more careful; you are both of you delicate and far from strong. You bid me take care of myself to what purpose do I cocker myself against November, if you two fling away your healths-nay, I will now not look so early as to November. Do not, I implore you, set out in great heats. Fatigue and hot bad inns may lay you up where there is no assistance. Oh! I now feel again all the aversion I felt last year to yr journey! Travel slowly, I beseech you; I had rather wait months for you, than have you run any risk. Surely you will keep very quiet till you begin yr journey, and perfectly recruit your health. Dear Mr. Berry, exert your authority, and do not suffer them to be giddy and rash, nor plunge into any more diversions.'-Vol. i. pp. 321, 322.

His style, formed on a different view of life, and little employed upon the affections, is weak and declamatory, when the heart seeks to express itself. It is, we consider, scarcely fair to give us many such sentences as if I persisted in adding to this (letter), I could only specify a million more of apprehensions and execrations of 'your journey,' and so on. Or, because he had expressed a wish for their return, 'Oh! I shall abhor myself—yes, abhor 'myself, if I have drawn you into the smallest risk, or even incon'venience. A certain simplicity is necessary to give such fears dignity. He is himself alive to this weak point, for after an outburst of grief at the fate of Marie Antoinette, which for once tells much better for his heart than his head, he enjoins Miss Berry in such anxious terms to show this letter to no one, that the editor has just scruples in giving it to the light even now. The tragedy of life was at all times terrible to his nerves; he owns to shutting his eyes designedly on it whenever he could. Thus he writes in reply to one of her letters :

You was right in concluding I should disapprove of yr visiting hospitals. One ought to surmount disgust where it is one's duty, or one can do any good, or perform an act of friendship; but it is a rule with me to avoid any disagreeable object or idea, where I have not the smallest power of redress or remedy. I would not read any of the accounts of the earthquakes in Sicily and Calabria; and when I catch a glimpse of a report of condemned malefactors to the Council, I clap my finger on the paragraph, that I may not know when they are to suffer, and have it run in my head. It is worse to go into hospitals-there is contagion into the bargain. I have heard of a French princess, who had a taste for such sights, and once said, "Il faut avouer, que j'ai vû aujourd'hui une agonie magnifique.” Your tender nature is not made for such spectacles; and why attrist it, without doing any service? One needs not recur to the index of the book

of creation to hunt for miserable sufferers. What would I give not to have heard the calamities fallen on the heads of the King and Queen of France! I know no more yet than of their being betrayed and stopped at Clermont, and ordered back to Paris, with their children! What superabundance of woe!'-Vol. i. P. 307.

This is the constitution to which gossip is the most perfectly congenial. The trifles of the day, the doings of our neighbours, are welcome not only as feeding curiosity and providing novelty, but as rescuing the mind from vague fears, from the peril of falling unawares and for want of other refuge upon the more solemn startling circumstances of life, and all the train of thoughts that haunts them. Nothing terrible was endurable to Horace Walpole till its horrors were quenched in the ludicrous, as in this saying of the French princess. It was in this way that he could think of death-even his own death, which he was fully aware could not be far distant: he turned it into gossip, something for the town to talk about: and thus the vaguest of all terrors was entrenched in what Charles Lamb has called the sweet security of streets,' and associated with commonplacepeople and their modes of viewing things. In the same way the pains which crippled him are domesticated agreeably enough:

"Your Corydon does not forget that he is seventy-four, nor conceal one particle of his rheumatism. His dread of being gone before November does not look as if he thought himself immortal. I cannot finish with my own hand, for yesterday morning I had a good deal of pain, the incorpo rated society of rheumatism and gout have got down to my elbow and wrist. *** I slept last night without waking, but if I want still more gout, I think I can draw upon my right knee, where there seems a little in store for me.'-Vol. i. pp. 314, 315.

He knew the world too well to complain of his maladies in set terms; he must make a joke of them and render them amusing to his friends, or he feared to degenerate in their minds into a commonplace example of old age. So long as he could play with his infirmities they might forget them in him.

to

As for his taste-that taste with which he sought to imbue her-we detect, what is excusable in old age, and is perhaps better than blind prejudice in favour of what has been, a readiness to be caught by the new and pretty,—a want of power discriminate between gold and tinsel, sham and reality, which betrays the weakness of his whole line in this respect. He is in transports over Darwin's Botanic Garden, which he classes with the Arabian Nights,' and King's College Chapel as above all rule. In his Gothic proclivities and turn for the romantic and picturesque, he may be regarded as a pioneer and herald of our own century's feelings on these points, yet he does not show any sense of the meaning and tendencies of what his fancy approves. He likes the 'pageantry of popery,' and regrets 'the